The Emerging Technology SIG recently heard a presentation on Grid Computing. While Grid computing is interesting, it addresses a problem that will soon become a non-problem, as this short and lighthearted presentation will demonstrate.

Grid computing is about sharing resources. There are many different types of resources in a computer system and Grid computing is mainly concerned with sharing resources like compute power and storage. These are resources that are easy to share, however there is little point in sharing them as they will soon be in embarresing oversupply. To show this we will look at technology trends. We will also look at some of the real problems that these technology trends imply.

Telematics - The Road Ahead

Jeff will provide a business and technical overview to the Telematics marketplace. He'll also present the value chain of products and technologies that enable end-to-end solutions, architecture for both back-end and in-vehicle components and some recommendations on opportunities. This presentation is targeted at both technical and business professionals, and the greater wireless community.

Richard works for IBM as architect on the Red Brick Warehouse database system. He is also a Chair of the SDF Business Intelligence SIG. Richard previously worked on parallel database systems at DEC and Data-Cache. Before that he helped architect the Inmos Transputer, a 32 bit microprocessor for building parallel systems. Richard has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge.

Jeffrey Zank, Technologist

Jeffrey Zank has over eighteen years of technology and systems marketing, business development, software engineering, professional services and management experience.

In his most recent role at Sun Microsystems Jeff was the customer engineering manager the telematics initiative. During Jeff's sixteen years tenure at Sun, he filled a variety of professional roles in product marketing, market development, software engineering management, professional services management, alliance / customer relationship management, strategy, planning and programs. In these roles Jeff has lead alliances and customer adoption and integration of technologies into industry focused solutions expanding Sun's market position and revenue in targeted market segments. Jeff has also worked as a software engineer enabling him understand and develop both technical and business value propositions for customers.

Jeff earned a BS in Operations Research and Information Systems from Eastern Michigan University and is working on his MBA.